The Twin Towers, rising above New York City in 1972.Roger Viollet/Getty Images

The day the screaming came across our sky, there was no “evacuation” as in the apocalyptic opening of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The “destroying planes” which E.B. White prophesied in the final pages of “Here Is New York” — from 1949! — did not “end this island fantasy.”

But they might have, had New Yorkers heeded the deep thinkers who proclaimed the town dead after 9/11. Marooned in Rome on Sept. 11, 2001, unable to fly home until six days later, I, too, feared that life would never be the same. Even if the villains were brought to justice promptly, even if the World Trade Center could be rebuilt in a day, surely “The City That Never Sleeps” must take on a sinister new meaning.

In the nightmare’s wake, it was easy to believe the pundits bloviating from my hotel TV that all cities were obsolete. Although the digital age made it unnecessary for people to be so densely concentrated, the argument went, they stubbornly clung to “Downtown” for old times’ sake. But 9/11 surely finished off that quaint habit, and a mass exodus was inevitable.

Of course it would take nearly 10 years for Osama bin Laden to be hunted down and nearly as much time for rebirth to take hold at Ground Zero; the prolonged futility of both efforts cast twin shadows over a city yearning to replace the Twin Towers.

Yet, even in the attack’s hellish immediate aftermath, something in the New York spirit was already stirring which would ultimately carry the day.

Counterintuitively, the city became a more, not less, attractive place. Upstate suburbanites, Russian oligarchs and Pakistani taxi drivers would, in numbers unprecedented in recent generations, move here to invest, work and make their homes.

To identify a providential aftermath to terror on a mass scale is not to deny or minimize the tragedy. Certainly it can’t mitigate the anguish of victims’ families and friends. But New York’s heroic, disciplined, compassionate response to the nightmare — and outpouring of love immortalized in thousands of anguished cellphone recordings, heard around the globe — made the city more alluring. Contrary to stereotypes, the mansions of our humanity were commensurate with the majesty of our skyline, and the world took notice.

The valor of firefighters who charged into the burning towers rubbed off on the rest of us. If a single human feat might be taken to epitomize post-9/11 selflessness, it was subway rescuer Wesley Autrey’s leap onto the track to save a fallen passenger. If one miracle could stand for the city’s resurrection, it was Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s all-hands-saved water landing. “Sully” was not a New Yorker — but who’s to say the sight through his window of the wounded skyline, contoured by heroism and loss, did not redouble his resolve to save his passengers?

While there’s much to criticize about Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty, he effectively grew the city within its own borders by rezoning dead “industrial” neighborhoods for residential use. The population of the five boroughs swelled by many more souls than the US Census was able to count (obvious to anyone strolling through teeming Astoria, Jackson Heights or Bensonhurst). Even downtown, with a mass grave in its midst, doubled in population to nearly 60,000.

Who in late 2001 could imagine the High Line Park, hotels on the Gowanus Canal, or Condé Nast moving to the horror site itself? The rejuvenation of neighborhoods from Bushwick and Red Hook in Brooklyn to Melrose-Morrisania in The Bronx marches on.

How blessed we are to be fighting over bike lanes, rather than over whether to live here at all! Weightier debates over charter schools and municipal debt, too, are best viewed as fractious family squabbles of the sort to which New Yorkers seem genetically disposed.

For all our legendary contentiousness — and our reflexive tolerance for the politically and socially intolerable — rebirth wouldn’t have happened without unity on one irreducible point. We are of one mind that terrorism is evil beyond semantic hairsplitting.

Many New Yorkers opposed the war in Iraq. But I’ve never heard a single one express respect or sympathy for suicidal murderers who afforded helpless victims no chance to fight back. Even the most forgiving liberalism, it would seem, found its limit on 9/11.

Gotham had the bad guys on the run from the moment Rudy Giuliani led us out of the dark and reclaimed downtown one block at a time. We’ve been rolling up the score ever since.

Today, a new World Trade Center is reclaiming the sky. Bin Laden will miss our 10th anniversary commemoration — an occasion to mourn, yes, of course, but a victory lap we have earned as well.

A Tribute to Stephen Siller

Stephen Siller, 34, finished up a late shift at the firehouse in Park Slope when his scanner alerted him of the attacks. Siller called his wife, Sarah, to let her know he would be late getting home that night — he was rushing to the scene. It was the last time they spoke. It’s now believed that Siller, after lugging his gear through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to Manhattan on foot, met up with the other 11 members of Squad 1 in the South Tower. None of them survived.

Now, an annual run commemorates Siller’s heroism, and has raised more than $10 million for everyone from wounded veterans to victims of Hurricane Katrina. A portion of the proceeds from this magazine will benefit the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation.